Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

          Comes the big day that Donald J. Trump is sworn into the highest office in the land, and he, Congress and Donald’s minions pick up their lottery check.

          Neither he, Congress nor his True Believers expected him to win. But like a lottery, where winners don’t earn or deserve all that money, but wake up rich, all who wear ball caps backward, the take-this-job-and-stick-it crowd, and all who’ve longed to poke fingers in the public’s eye, feel that God or good luck has smiled on all of them.

          The GOP Congress, having steeled themselves for a November downsizing, suddenly were heard to crow like roosters at daybreak. Paul Ryan’s sullen look ahead at eight years of playing second fiddle to a Democrat, turned to clucking around Congress as if he’d climbed Everest, when in truth he fell into it due to no credit of his own. He should worry now that Donald might Tweet him some 3 a.m. with remembrance of things past—like how Ryan deserted him during the campaign—and announce Paul’s new job as doorman at Trump Tower.

          For his part, the Trump-ster flitted about on Victory tours, zinged Arnie the Terminator about his old reality show, and traded slaps with Meryl Streep—all so “presidential.” Obama, by contrast, was allowed no victory laps, not even for getting bin Ladin, not for his good-bye speech—witness Sean Hannity’s tirade afterward on Fox.

          Certainly we shall long remember Donald’s list of miscreant words and behavior: You can’t un-see and un-hear things said and done on his campaign trail; they are the stuff of ugly legend and regrettably part of history’s indelible archive.

          The White House, if nothing else, is #TheHomeOfBadLuck, and our Commanders in Chief are sorely tested ere they can warm their new seat in the Oval Office. North Korea’s manchild, Kim Jong Un, will soon brandish a warhead-on-a-stick at us and Donald will find such people, crazy as they are, and wielding real power, can’t be stiffed the way he did his real estate investors.

          The latest signs that his will be a stormy tenure are his conflicts with both the Intel community and the press; a third front lingering in the background is his coming war with Congress itself which, after all, neither supported nor elected him, leaving that instead to voters who don’t like their Reps any more than they do Hillary and Democrats.

          Trump’s recent press conference is the gold standard of miscues. Whoever thinks CNN’s Jim Acosta was out of order should think again: from the top, Donald called out that network as one of “fake news,” thereby inviting a follow-up from Acosta, but one that Trump refused to take or to answer, and his press secretary warned the correspondent that he would be thrown from the press corps for future “outbursts.”

          Then Kellyanne Conway, the newest Pretty Little Liar on TV, pressed the matter in a long interview with CNN by conflating its news coverage with that of the notorious BuzzFeed source and for having given credence to Russia’s hacking claim, both of which are blatantly incorrect. But such is Team Trump’s strategy to discredit the press—which we follow to our peril: it is rather the public’s main safeguard against governmental tyranny.

Along the way Donald continues to flip-flop on campaign promises whilst Conway assures us that her new work-hubby seldom means what he says. We’ll see if she can spin him out of a looming cloud of Russian hacking may have compromised her boss himself.

          Sadly, Donald may, amid his pique, take it all out on anyone he dislikes, or who don’t “treat him nice,” and begin to use police powers to teach them a lesson. If so, mark it as a sign of the Apocalypse.

          We deserve better but, when ours is ancient history, a latter-day poet may discover Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” and liken it to a future American wasteland where “…two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…(and) half-sunk, a shattered visage lies” with “…frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command…” and the cold postscript that “nothing beside remains ‘round the decay of that colossal wreck…”–then perhaps a footnote referencing to an arrogant billionaire confidence man in a day when people voted away their freedom for tempting fleshpots of hoped-for “change.”

          For now, Inauguration day cometh, and the world will see Donald in all his glory. Next day, cometh a Reality Show the likes of which he never dreamed.

          What distinguishes America, said Walt Whitman, was that here, presidents tip their hats to the people, not the other way around. Keep an eye on Donald’s “Make America Great” cap in coming days, and learn to bow before it.